Maciej contrasts web developers to our game developer siblings, that often have 5 years between consoles. He cites this, as why you can track massive improvements throughout the years as they familiarize themselves with and master the current technology set. Maciej argues, that today web designers and developers aren't given any time to get used to the current set of devices and capabilities, before we’re already being sent to work on the next set, so what is passed off as web technology improvement is just bloat.
Maciej's slide (shown in this article's cover image), shows the old technology stack the internet is built on as an example of how things fossilize in technology when they are useful.
The talk's concluding questions and statements rocked me:
- So why should the web be an exception?
- Why does the web have to change completely?
- Why can’t we build on top of it, like we built on top of email? Find better ways to improve it's design and management, but acknowledge that the idea is still solid and sound.
Let’s Discuss
What are we personally building the web for (to connect the world, eat the world, or end the world)? Also what would the internet look like/how would we change our development practices, if we treated it as a medium that was meant to last?
Top comments (4)
Too much fuss for a matter of personal preference. You like to ride one hype train after the other? There's javascript for you, the choice is there. You like web dev for what you KNOW it is rather for what it COULD be? Tbh I'm still using pretty much the same arsenal I did as a junior, Apache, mysql, perl, php etc, are still here the difference is now I can just download a nice framework to save myself some config time. So what I'm really trying to say is this: Don't sweat too much over issues that tend to solve themselves.
I find Maciej's fusses entertaining 😄
Here's the thing - nobody actually got rid of the old stuff. If you spent a ton of time leaning Wordpress, you can still build things on top of it. If you leaned how to browserify your angular 1.4 project with sass and bootstrap 3 in 2014, you still build great stuff with that stack.
I learned things hacking on Node 0.10 and 0.12 that are still valuable in node 8. All the cool kids
export {thing} as defaultthese days, but shhhhh, don't tell anyone butmodule.exports = thingis still there and works fine.Chasing the latest and greatest is a choice. Yes I think we should all keep our skills up to date, but there is room for mastery on top of proven patterns and NOT using every project to learn a new technology can free you up get better at what you already know.
I read an article where ruby on rails was compared to, can't remember the other software, on 0/n pushes and gets. Yes the other software was faster but for the end user the time difference was negligible.